A few months ago I received a tempting offer: to become ISIS’ chief technology officer.

How could I refuse?

Before you pick up the phone and call the police, you should know that it was ‘just’ a wargame, initiated and operated by the strategical consulting firm Wikistrat. Many experts on ISIS and the Middle East in general have taken part in the wargame, and have taken roles in some of the sides that are waging war right now on Syrian soil – from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, to the Western-backed rebels and even ISIS.

This kind of wargames is pretty common in security organizations, in order to understand what the enemy thinks like. As Harper Lee wrote, “You never really understand a man… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

And so, to understand ISIS, I climbed into its skin, and started thinking aloud and discussing with my ISIS teammates what we could do to really overwhelm our enemies.

But who are those enemies?

In one word, everyone.

This is not an overestimate. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliph, has warned Muslims in 2015 that the organization’s war is – “the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war.”

Other spiritual authorities who help explain ISIS’ policies to foreigners and potential converts, agree with Baghdadi. The influential Muslim preacher Abu Baraa, has similarly stated that “the world is divided into two camps. Make sure you are on the side of the Muslims. You shouldn’t be on the side of the infidels, nor should you be on the fence, neutral…”

This approach is, of course, quite comfortable for ISIS, since the organization needs to draw as many Muslims as possible to its camp. And so, thinking as ISIS, we realized that we must find a way to turn this seemingly-small conflict of ours into a full-blown religious war: Muslims against everyone else.

Unfortunately, it seems most Muslims around the world do not agree with those ideas.

How could we convince them into accepting the truth of the global religious war?

It was obvious that we needed to create a fracture between the Muslim and Christian world, but world leaders weren’t playing to our tune. The last American president, Barack Obama, fiercely refused to blame Islam for terror attacks, emphasizing that “We are not at war with Islam.”

French president Francois Hollande was even worse for our cause: after an entire summer of terror attacks in France, he still refused to blame Islam. Instead, he instituted a new Foundation for Islam in France, to improve relations with the nation’s Muslim community.

The situation was clearly dire. We needed reinforcements in fighters from Western countries. We needed Muslims to join us, or at the very least rebel against their Western governments, but very few were joining us from Europe. Reports put the number of European Muslims joining ISIS at barely 4,000, out of 19 million Muslims living in Europe. That means just 0.02% of the Muslim population actually cared enough about ISIS to join us!

Things were even worse in the USA, in which, according to the Pew Research Center, Muslims were generally content with their lives. They were just as likely as other Americans to have earned college degrees and attended graduate schools, and to report household incomes of $100,000 or more. Nearly two thirds of Muslims stated that they “do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society”. Not much chance to incite a holy war there.

So we agreed on trying the usual things: planning terror attacks, making as much noise as we possibly could, keep on the fight in the Middle East and recruiting Muslims on social media. But we realized that things really needed to change if radical Islam were to have any chance at all. We needed a new kind of world leader: one who would play by our ideas of a global conflict; one who would close borders for Muslims, and make Muslim immigrants feel unwanted in their countries; one who would turn a deaf ear to the plea of refugees, simply because they came from Muslim countries.

After a single week in ISIS, it was clear that the organization desperately need a world leader who thinks and acts like that.